The Prime Response

The greatest purpose of God is His own Glorification because only He is worth worshiping. This is our prime response – worship.

What is worship? It is that thing which we see as greater and worth more than ourselves. It is that thing which causes us to peer into our souls and see we are not what we would like us to be or what we are in reality. It is that thing which leads us to see a point to a pointless existence.

What good is man? Animals exist, and doing what they do is neither good nor evil, just done. With man, we call something good or something evil and put a value and a morality on it. Subjectively we say this is good and that is bad – usually based on how it directly effects us but sometimes altruistically to meet our own philosophy.

Surely Hitler saw himself not as evil but doing as much good as Mother Teresa. Left on our own we see ourselves as good or having the potential for good. Even those who suffer from poor self-esteem truly see themselves as having good in their lack of goodness for they keep their eyes intent upon themselves.

So, since only God is good, we have elevated ourselves to Him and so we move our worship to ourselves – either thorough an object or an idea or a concept or a person.

A Christian is someone who has said "I am not good." Our eyes have been opened to our own depravity, not only our capability of evil but our desire for evil, and have been disgusted with our filthiness and hopeless in our knowledge that we are not worthy of praise but worthy of disdain.

Then comes Christ, God Himself who sacrifices His Holiness for the sin of each of us so that we will no longer worship ourselves but worship only Him Who is worth worship, and in doing so moves us from a purposeless existence – self direction – to a purposeful life – worship.

Our prime response to the world around us and all our circumstances and all our joy and all our trials and all our pain and all our pleasure and all our noise and all our quiet is to look upward and raise our arms and soar our heart to the Lord in worship.

This is not an easy thing to do. Our flesh tugs at our shirt like a young child who wants attention from a distracted adult. Our sin wants to rob God of His glory. Our perverseness holds hostage worship in hopes of getting something to feed its hunger for depravity.

In this we must train ourselves to capture our thoughts, make them obedient to Christ, ready to punish that thought by obliteration if it is not a thought that brings forth worship of God. We must fall to our real or virtual knees when we see sin in action around us and weep for the starving, dark, cold world that wallows in its own foolishness when the full, light, warm love of God is within thought’s reach.